WOW! Image Browsing and Uploading Feature on wordpress.com

This applies to the 2005 version of WordPress and WordPress.com.

Owen Winkler, plugin author of Exhibit Preview has been working on an addition to the next version of WordPress to improve access, uploading, and viewing of images within the WordPress Write Post administration panel, as has Andy Skelton. Well, whether they are working alone or together, and Donncha says it is Andy, we are on the right track. Thank you!

For those of you on wordpress.com, you have another surprise waiting for you on your Write Post administration panel. It is called Image Uploading.

Below a banner of thumbnail views of your uploaded images, there are buttons that navigate you through the images in your files folder, and a button for Upload New and Browse All. I assume that sorting by folder and searching might be in the near future.

To use the new Image Uploading feature, click Upload New. This will cause the menu area to change to a menu for finding your image and adding the title and description. Click Browse to dig around on your hard drive to find the image. You can use the Menu View menu or button on your browse window to switch the view to a Thumbnail View, allowing you to see the images as you search.

Find the image you want to upload and click it, then click Open. The link to the image is entered into the Image input form. You then type in the Title and Description and click Upload.

Your image will then be visible as a thumbnail view in the Image Uploading viewer. To use the image in your post, click on it and drag it to where you want to put it in the post. It should go in beautiful if you are using the Rich Text Editor feature. If you are not, the link to the image and the image title will appear, but they will not be in an HTML img tag. I expect that to be fixed soon. You will have to put it in your own tag until that is fixed or use the img quicktag.

This is a very cool feature and I see a lot of possibilities for it in the future, but right now, it is new and it has a lot of bugs and limitations.

One major bug that will probably be fixed within the next couple hours is a funky conflict that loads the Theme Preview into the Image Uploading panel section after clicking Save and Continue Editing. Opps! It happens after the page is almost finished loading. You see the Image Uploading browse panel, and then just at the last second, it pops in with the Theme Preview.

This creates an immediate problem as the Upload tab is now gone, so if you run into this problem, you can no longer upload images to your site until this is fixed. Hey, guys, leave the Upload tab as a backup until this is fixed!😉

The lack of HTML tagging in the non-Rich Text Editor view is one problem. The images can be clicked and dragged into place, but no options for alignment are given. You have to enter that manually, or click on the image and set the alignment. While it asks for the title and description, is that description stored? How would we know since it isn’t evident when adding the link to the post.

The link to the image comes in as a full absolute link rather than a relative link. I much prefer the latter, so I hope that this will be changed in the future. Another annoying part about the link is that it is sorted automatically into the year and month you are posting. So an image uploaded today goes into /files/2005/9/ instead of just into the /files folder or a folder of my choice. Since I tend to reuse graphics from time to time, finding in which month I put which graphic is horrid. For those who post their photographs and graphics once, then it doesn’t matter.

You can’t delete or rename images, which is a bugger. I haven’t tried uploading a duplicate, so hopefully the same features on the original Upload will apply, allowing you to overwrite or rename any image you add a second time with the same name.

If you already have images in your blog, these will not be viewable, as of right now, in your new Image Uploading panel. Only images uploaded through this feature are currently visible.

I hope the ability to create subfolders to organize images and to grab Flickr and other sources for images will be available, since so many people enjoy Flickr’s benefits and easy use.

The image uploading feature is NOT available for Pages. Any graphics you want on Pages, right now, will have to uploaded via the Write Post panel and then the link copied into your Page.

The title of the section is Image Uploading, and I haven’t tested for podcasts, MP3 and other file uploading possibilities. According to Donncha, that is coming. The project that Owen Winkler has been working on is ready to go for a variety of file types, including Flickr. Having seen his image handling efforts at work, WordPress users could really benefit from the easy and powerful features.

Still, this is a dramatic improvement in how WordPress works and handles images and media. It also makes WordPress 1.6 even more worth of anticipation. The easier it is to handle images and media within a blog, the more people will flock to its use. Good work all. Congrats!

2 Comments

I thought I should add that if the images you are trying to upload have spaces in their names e.g.
“September 2005.jpg” you’ll encounter an error.
Wordpress seems to prefer files names like “September2005.jpg” at the moment.
This wasn’t a bug previously with the Upload option.